Image: Lucasfilm Ltd.
With Chapter 11, “The Heiress,” The Mandalorian finally became The Mandalorians. Our guy Din Djarin meets the Mandalorian covert he’s been seeking. They arrive in the knick of time to save Din and the Child, which they do without question before removing their helmets for a chat.
Uh, what? This is not the way.
But to understand more, we need a little history lesson about Mandalore and its people.
Wars and Ways
Over the course of their history, Mandalorians became known as combative people. They became accustomed to near-constant war which ravaged Mandalore’s environment. Towards the end of the Old Republic, a new order of Mandalorians (literally the New Mandalorians) and rose to power, pushing for peace. This led to a civil war, and to the Death Watch faction which hoped to restore the old warmongering ways.
In “The Heiress,” Bo-Katan refers to Din as “a child of the Watch… a cult of zealots that broke away from Mandalorian society. Their goal was to reestablish the ancient Way.”
This tracks with the fact that Din is the first Mandalorian we’ve seen in canon to be so vigilant about keeping his helmet on. Mandalorian characters in Star Wars: Rebels and Star Wars: Clone Wars regularly showed their faces, yet we feel Din’s shock and disgust whenever he witnesses this act on The Mandalorian. The Way in which he was raised is not necessarily the norm on Mandalore.
The heiress
Mando’s new ally is a familiar one to Clone Wars fans. Bo-Katan Kryze is the titular heiress of this episode, a daughter of Mandalore and sister of its former duchess, Satine. During the Mandalorian Civil War, Satine was on the side of pacifism while Bo-Katan actually joined Death Watch.
That changed when Darth Maul took over Mandalore during the Clone Wars. Bo became part of a resistance faction within Death Watch and fought in the Siege of Mandalore to defend her planet and its people. Maul was overthrown and Bo-Katan installed as Regent of Mandalore, but Imperial forces continued to gain power and ousted her once the Empire took over.
The Darksaber
The weapon Bo-Katan is seeking, which we last saw in the hands of Moff Gideon in The Mandalorian Season 1, has a complicated history. It was forged by Tarre Vizsla, the first Mandalorian ever to join the Jedi Order after the Jedi and Mandalorians’ fraught history. After his death, his family members stole it back from the Jedi Temple and kept it in the family. They believed it belonged to House Vizsla and Mandalore, not to the “race of enemy sorcerers” who inducted Tarre into their ranks.
Tarre’s descendant Pre was part of Death Watch and defeated by Maul, who then took the saber. Years later, after the Empire rose, it was recovered by the Mandalorian Sabine Wren who fought alongside the rebels. She eventually gave it to Bo-Katan, and from there we don’t know how it fell into Gideon’s hands — but something tells us Bo didn’t gift-wrap it and hand it over with a smile.
The Mandalorian is streaming on Disney+, with new episodes every Friday.